Mohammed Saeed

17th Century Poetry

Mid-term exam
A take home exam

Q) What is metaphysical poetry? Write a short essay about its historical

context and the main literary figures of the period in question?
Metaphysical poetry is a group of poems that share common
characteristics: they are all highly intellectualized, use rather strange imagery, use
frequent paradox and contain extremely complicated thoughts. Literary critic and
poet Samuel Johnson first coined the term 'metaphysical poetry' in his book Lives
of the Most Eminent English Poets (1179-1781). In the book, Johnson wrote about
a group of 17th-century British poets that included John Donne, Andrew
Marvell, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. He noted
how the poets shared many common characteristics, especially ones of wit and
elaborate style. The word 'meta' means 'after,' so the literal translation of
'metaphysical' is 'after the physical.' Basically, metaphysics deals with questions
that can't be explained by science. It questions the nature of reality in a
philosophical way. Some common metaphysical questions: Does God exist? Is
there a difference between the way things appear to us and the way they really are?
Essentially, what is the difference between reality and perception? Is everything
that happens already predetermined? If so, then is free choice non-existent? Is
consciousness limited to the brain? Metaphysics can cover a broad range of topics
from religious to consciousness; however, all the questions about metaphysics
ponder the nature of reality. Metaphysics is about exploration and philosophy, not
about science and math. Metaphysical poetry investigates the relation between
rational, logical argument on the one hand and intuition or ―mysticism‖ on the
other, often depicted with sensuous detail Metaphysical poetry is considered highly
ambiguous due to high intellect and knowledge of metaphysical poets. Religious
Scene: Religion and politics were inseparably blended together in England in those
momentous years. The revolt against the sovereign also meant a revolt against the
official Anglican church and the Anglican Archbishop, Laud. Similarly, the victory
of the Parliament meant the ascendancy of Protestantism. The official Anglican
church fell and rose with the fall and rise of the British sovereignty. Discussing the
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role of religion in the early seventeenth century, Marjorie Cox says: "Religion
dominated both national and personal life in the early seventeenth century; in both
it was a matter of life and death." 'Whosoever bringeth an innovation in religion is
a capital enemy of the Commonwealth', the House of Commons resolved in 1639;
among individuals many, like Baxter, were 'serious and solicitous about my Soul‘s
everlasting state.' An intense interest in theological controversy, and to some extent
in books of devotion, was common to almost all ranks of society. Probably nearly
half of the books published between 1600 and 1640 were on religious topics. Their
readers ranged from the nobility, through the gentry to the yeomen, the citizens and
the apprentices. In such a society, virtually without newspapers, the pulpit played
an outstanding part. To all the pulpit had a political as well as religious
significance; it was a way of reaching the vast bulk of the population, church-going
was legally enforceable, but equally sermons were a genuine popular interest."
Broadly, the forties saw the destruction of the traditional framework of authority in
church and State. In the church, the abolition of the High Commission removed the
strongest disciplinary sanction. Laud was executed in 1645,and about a third of the
parish clergy were ejected from their livings. The Puritans gave Utopian visions of
reforms and rebuilding of society. Religious inspiration lay behind this reforming
idealism, and an extraordinary number of men were gripped by the conviction of
imminence of Christ's kingdom Cromwell opened the "Parliament of Saints" in
1653 with the words ―why should we be afraid to say or think that this may be the
door to usher in the things that God hath promised and prophesied?‖ The Puritan
domination of the pulpit for the past half-century had encouraged the popular study
of the Bible, and the fruits of that impulse appeared as the traditional controls and
inhibitions were loosened. The doctrine of the 'inner light' and the reaction against
predestination encouraged a shift from dogmatic religion towards a more rational
theology and a more humanitarian religion. Social Reforms: The champions of
democracy demanded manhood suffrage, a fairer distribution of Parliamentarian
seats, and the protection of the people's rights by fundamental law binding their
representatives. They also demanded agrarian reforms: first common lands and
then private estates were to become common property, but not by violence. Some
of the reforms demanded were curiously modern, such as women's suffrage and
free medical aid for the poor. There was a strong movement for simplifying the
complexities of the law. Radical changes in the system of education were also
suggested. Eminent continental reformers in education were invited to advise on
educational reforms. The Literary Scene: Equally animated was the literary scene
in England during those stormy years. London became the centre of all literary and

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1 cultural activities. The habit of reading was widespread all over the country.
Romances, histories, the popular taste. There was a considerable e increase in the
number of books sermons, handbooks on manners and on business a and roadside
ballads fed printed annually. The fateful years y of the Civil War saw a flood of
pamphlet sand tracts coming up on the c controversial religious and I political
issues of the day. Some of the most talented authors, such as John Milton, were
drawn to play their role in the war of pamphlets (1). Metaphysical poets is a label
often attached to a loosely connected group of seventeenth-century poets, among
whom the main or central figures are John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George
Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. As for John Donne, he was an
English poet who lived from 1572-1631. During his lifetime he practiced law,
served in governmental positions as elected official, and became a religious leader
after his conversion to Anglicanism. Donne struggled with his health throughout
his life and sustained the loss of his wife and several of his children, which were all
experiences that shaped him into an introspective person. He was praised as a
writer and preacher. Donne's legacy today is for his contributions to writing as a
prominent metaphysical poet. His works "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" and
"Death Be Not Proud" are shining examples of his abilities to question concepts of
love, life, and death through the written word. Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678) was
an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of
Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth
period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the
love-song "To His Coy Mistress", to evocations of an aristocratic country house
and garden in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden", the political address "An
Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland", and the later personal and
political satires "Flecknoe" and "The Character of Holland". George Herbert
(1593 – 1633) was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England.
His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is
recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists." He was born in
Wales into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He
received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge,
in 1609. He went there with the intention of becoming a priest, but he became the
University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He sat in the
Parliament of England in 1624 and briefly in 1625. Herbert's father was a wealthy
Aristocrat, a member of Parliament who knew many writers and poets such as John
Donne. His mother Magdalen later became a patron and friend of John Donne. The
wild and unpredictable nature of some of his best verse - 'The Collar', for instance,

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or Love (III)' - is offset by the poems lovingly and carefully carved into the shapes
of birds' wings, or crosses, or altars. Herbert's The Temple was the book that King
Charles I read in his final hours, for consolation.

Q) Why art or rather literature is important? How the artist’s methods are
different from the scientist’s! Relate your discussion to your own experience,
your point of view of your understanding!
―Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of
humanity.‖ — P. T. Barnum. All literature, whether it be poems, essays, novels, or
short stories, helps us address human nature and conditions which affect all people.
These may be the need for growth, doubts, and fears of success and failure, the
need for friends and family, the goodness of compassion and empathy, trust, or the
realization of imperfection. We learn that imperfection is not always bad and that
normal can be boring. We learn that life must be lived to the fullest. We need
literature in order to connect with our own humanity. Literature is important and
necessary. It provides growth, strengthens our minds, and gives us the ability to
think outside the box. Literature can help us make better sense of our world, our
lives and ourselves. Literature has the power to give us an enriched understanding
of other worlds, lives and times, of the way things have been and how they might
be. Reading, thinking, writing and talking about literature is both a personal and
collegiate experience - a model of how society operates or should operate.
Literature embodies the values of imagination, identification and empathy. These
matter in an increasingly divisive world. Characters in literature are very often
transformed by the plot and this process models the way literature intervenes in our
own lives and can transform them. The shared experience of studying literature in
gives us the ability and the need to read the world and its texts on our own.
Studying literature recognises that the making of meaning is a dynamic and
volatile process and that meanings are socially and culturally produced, as various
and multiple as readers. Studying literature explores the text in its many contexts,
how the text finds and makes a place in the world, how it is enabled to speak and to
make a difference. Studying literature and critical reading are an opening out that
returns us to the text in an adventure that never finishes. The study and criticism of
literature is the asking of questions that generate more and better questions. The
study and criticism of literature is not just a social act but an inherently political
act. In a civilised society, the two most important things are: Art and Science. The

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scientist is curious about the universe. Ha wants to know the truth about some
things in life. These things are fixed facts. He attempts to know why water boils at
specific temperature and freezes at another. Why one person behave differently
from another. What are the stars? What is the world really like? So, truth is the
main thing a scientist looks for. On the other hand, an artist seeks beauty. Both
the artist and the scientist are seeking something which _they think is real. Their
methods are different. The scientist sets his brain to work and, by a slow process of
trial and error, after long experiment and enquiry, he finds his answer. This is
usually an exciting moment. We remember the story of Archimedes finding his
famous principle in the bath and rushing out naked, shouting 'Eureka!' ('I've found
it!') The artist wants to make something which will produce just that sort of
excitement in the minds of other people - the excitement of discovering something
new about 'x - certain value', about reality. He may make a picture, a play, a poem,
or a palace, but he wants to make the people who see or hear or read his creation
feel excited and say about it, ―That is beautiful.‖ Beauty, then, you could define as
the quality you find in any object which produces in your mind a special kind of
excitement, an excitement some how tied up with a sense of discovery. It need not
be something made by man; a sunset or a bunch of flowers or a tree may make you
feel this excitement and utter the word 'Beautiful!' But the primary task of natural
things like flowers and trees and the sun is perhaps not to be beautiful but just to
exist. The primary task of the artist's creations is to be beautiful. Let us try to
understand a little more about this 'artistic excitement'. First of all, it is what is
known as a static excitement. It does not make you want to do anything. If you call
me a fool and various other bad names, shall get very excited and possibly want to
fight you. But the excitement of experiencing beauty leaves one content, as though
one has just achieved something. The achievement, as I have already suggested, is
the achievement of a discovery. But a discovery of what? I would say the discovery
of a pattern or the realisation of order. Life to most of us is just a jumble of
sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end. We are
also confused by a great number of contradictions: life is ugly, because people are
always trying to kill one another; life is beautiful, because we see plenty of
evidence of people trying to be kind to one another. A work of art seems to give us
the single answer by seeming to show that there is order or pattern in life. The
artist takes raw material and forces it into a pattern. If he is a painter he may
choose from the world about us various single objects – an apple, a table napkin, a
newspaper – and arrange them into a single composition on canvas – what is called
a ‗still-life‘. The musician takes the sounds produced by scraping a string and

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blowing down a tube, and he creates order out of them by forcing on them the
shape of a tune or the order of harmony. The novelist takes incidents from human
life and gives them a plot, a beginning and an end - another pattern. Unity, order,
and pattern may be created in other ways too. The poet may bring two completely
different things together and make them into a unity by creating a metaphor or
simile. T. S. Eliot, a modern poet, takes two completely different pictures - one of
the autumn evening, one of a patient in a hospital awaiting an operation - and joins
them together like this:
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is laid out against the sky, Like a
patient etherised upon a table. That is the highest kind of artistic experience. The
lowest kind is pure sensation: 'What a beautiful sunset!' means we are
overwhelmed by the colour; 'What a beautiful apple-pie!' means that our sense of
taste either now in the act of eating or else in anticipation is being pleased.
Between this kind of experience and the experience of 'patterns' comes another
kind: the pleasure of finding an artist able to express our feelings for us. The artist
finds a means of setting down our emotions - joy, passion, sorrow, regret - and, as
it were, helps us to separate those emotions from ourselves. Poets and musicians
are especially expert at expressing emotions for us. A death in the family, the loss
of money and other calamities are soothed by music and poetry, which seem to find
in words or sounds a means of getting the sorrow out of our systems. The writer of
literature is much more concerned with the connotations, the ways in which he can
make his words move or excite you, the ways in which he can suggest colour or
movement or character. The poet, whose work is said to represent the highest form
of literature, is most of all concerned with the connotations of words. Connotations
can be likened to the clusters of sounds you hear when you strike a single note on
the piano. Strike middle 'C' forcefully and you will hear far more than that one
note. You will hear fainter notes rising out of it, notes called harmonics. The note
itself is the denotation, the harmonics the connotations. The writer of literature,
especially the poet, differs from the scientist or lawyer in not restricting his words.
The scientist has to make his word mean one thing and one thing only, so does the
lawyer. But once the word - like our note on the piano - is allowed to vibrate freely,
it not only calls up associations but also, at times, suggests other completely
different meanings and perhaps even other words. Here is an extreme example:
Action calls like a bugle and my heart Buckles...
Now what does 'buckle' mean there? We use it to denote the fastening of a belt and
also the collapsing of any solid body - sheet metal, a bicycle wheel. Now in a piece

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of scientific or legal writing the word must have one meaning or the other. But in
this fragment of verse we are not so restricted. The word can carry two meanings,
can suggest two different things at the same time. So that this passage means: 'I am
called to action and I get ready for it: I buckle on my military equipment. But at the
same time I am afraid; my heart seems to collapse inside me, like a wheel
collapsing when it meets an obstacle.' Literature may be defined as words working
hard; literature is the exploitation of words. But literature has different branches,
and some branches do more exploiting of words than others. Poetry relies most on
the power of words, on their manifold suggestiveness, and in a sense you may say
that poetry is the most literary of all branches of literature; the most literary
because it makes the greatest use of the raw material of literature, which is words
(2). I can say here, after consciously drawing from what was mentioned previously,
that from my point of view, there are two main aspects of life in a sophisticated
society: Art and Science. Both the artist and the scientist are main parts of it. The
artist's method differs from the scientist's in that he finds beauty in things, unlike
the scientist's, who seeks facts. The artist's core of interest is the fascination that
can be conveyed to the reader or listener, for feelings, sensations, warmth, and the
hidden essence of things that do not appear in their abstract form, but rather in their
implicit form. The scientist is moving towards revealing the facts of the universe
and their causes. He is curious about things such as: the boiling point of water at
100 degrees Celsius, as well as its freezing point. He is also interested in asking
questions such as: Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? He is in
the process of researching and diving into such pure facts, and his tools are always
direct questions and clear connotations that do not contain any implicit words or
signals, but rather direct, clear words. While on the other hand, we find that the
artist, unlike the scientist, searches for beauty in things and conveys feelings and
sensations to others, and uses implicit and indirect words that carry more than one
meaning, especially in the field of poetry.

1) Milton, J. Paradise Lost

2) Burgess, A. (1958). English Literature